Reframing the language of human rights? Political group contestations on women’s and LGBTQI rights in European Parliament debates

Abstract

European integration is challenged on numerous grounds today with democracy and fundamental values at the center of the debates. The article analyses the role of the European Parliament’s political groups in shaping human rights as a core democratic value and the ways in which religion and gender equality are utilized. The research material consists of plenary debates and 130 MEP and staff interviews in the 8th and 9th legislatures. We discern three clusters in the ways in which the political groups frame human rights and gender equality: (i) ‘the defenders’, (ii) ‘the reframers’, and those (iii) ‘sitting on the fence’. Our analysis illustrates that core EU values such as human rights and equality are defended, challenged, and reframed by the political groups to an extent that they constitute key lines of division not only in between but also within the political groups.